


Whisk until Smooth

by talesofstories



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Baking, Blair is the worst pet, F/M, Sickfic, because that wouldn't be cool, caring for your injured partner, did you know you can borrow cookbooks from the library?, without making it obvious that you care, you can because libraries are the best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 05:50:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14635389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talesofstories/pseuds/talesofstories
Summary: Maka is injured, again, and Soul tries not to worry. It's both easier and harder than expected.





	Whisk until Smooth

Maka being injured is nothing new. She would spend a few days in the infirmary and then a few days simultaneously bossing him around and attempting to do everything herself before Stein would declare her fit to go back to missions. They would then kick ass, as they always did, until one or both of them landed in the infirmary again.

It isn’t the best cycle, but at least it’s a predictable one. Better than Blair’s cycle of attacking him, attempting to seduce him or some other creepy thing, and then treating him like her least-favorite kitten to mother while she goes out attempting to seduce other men, which is not predictable at all and is somewhat terrifying.

Soul still isn’t sure why she lives with them.

This time, though, the length of time Maka needs to spend in the infirmary is more than a few days, and Soul’s sent by his meister to the library to find her some new books. His subconscious whispers that this errand might be her way of getting him and his pacing away from her sick bed, but the relief at feeling as though he is of some use, as though he weren’t just a hunk of blood and flesh and metal and blade that could only sometimes keep her safe, is great enough that he ignores his dark doubts and focuses on a path he never took unless Maka were at his side.

Soul pushes thoughts of how weird it is to be here and not be following enthusiastically bobbing pigtails the same way he pushes open the library doors, which is to say, harder than perhaps necessary. He can’t waste time bothering with them if he has to get the books and get back to his meister before Black Star decides that the power of his presence could heal Maka faster than Dr. Stein’s medicine. If that happened, then he would have to look after Black Star as well, and frankly, Soul doesn’t value Black Star’s friendship to listen to him alternate between whining about being confined to bed for a week due to injury and making innuendo about it, which is what happened the last time he pissed off an injured Maka and she took swift revenge.

Even from her sick bed, even with an IV drip attached to her arm limiting her range of movement and keeping antibiotics in her system, his meister is _strong_.

Soul scans his eyes down the list of books that Maka had handed to him as he heads to the Classics section of the library. He had taken the list from her nonchalantly and then clutched it tightly in his hand as soon as he was out of her line of sight, so the list is now a bit sweaty and more than a bit crumpled. When she isn’t around, it is hard to remember he has to be cool and easy to remember the look on her face as she tried not to crumple into him as they looked at the glowing red soul of their latest defeated foe.

His mental collection of images of Maka’s pained face has grown far to large for his liking, but the only thing Soul can do about that is try to make sure that he has equal amounts of her delighted, exasperated, serious, and happy faces stored as well. And that he is doing as much as possible to give her those faces.

Soul pulls three books from the Classics section before moving to General Fiction. Two books from there and five from the Mystery section and his arms feel about ready to give up on life as he turns to leave the library when something catches his eye. He pauses for a minute before remembering that Maka will have to spend at least a week in the infirmary. His hand darts out almost without his conscious volition, grabbing another item to add to his stack.

* * *

Maka ends up spending two weeks in the infirmary, and Soul has to go back to the library three more times before she comes home. Each time, he stops in the same section that caught his eye on his first trip, hovering longer and longer each time before checking something out for himself.

* * *

When Maka gets back from the infirmary with the strict instructions to not do anything more exciting than attend classes and walk to the park to maybe supervise a pick-up basketball game, Soul knows he is in for a rough few weeks. Unlike him, who can sit and listen to a Miles Davis record for hours and be perfectly content, Maka needs to feel like she’s doing something, accomplishing something, even when she allows herself to relax. Which means, with her limited mobility, he’ll be the one trying to make sure she always has something in front of her, a goal to aim for as her body stitches itself back together.

Looking down at where she lies napping on their couch, there’s nothing he’d rather do.

* * *

The wound was a bit jagged, the blade that inflicted it a bit questionable, and the hole left in her a bit closer to some important internal organs than Dr. Stein would have preferred. So while everyone went to class, Maka was left sitting in the infirmary, alternating between staring at the ceiling and reading the books Soul plied her with. She had been looking forward to getting out, but it appears that instead of seeing her friends, she’ll be staring at a different ceiling and reading more books and, if she’s lucky, being walked around the block like a geriatric woman while her weapon hovers awkwardly at her elbow.

“You know I don’t know what that means, right? And cool people don’t hover.”

Maka huffs at Soul: “It means that I’m not some old woman! I’m a mesiter, and I’m going to be okay! I don’t need to be treated with kid gloves!”

The look Soul gives her at that statement is decidedly skeptical, and she can see where the hands in his pockets have balled into fists at her outburst, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to, not when his expression is clearly saying _I don’t think you’re weak_ and _this is how you heal_ and _I worry about you when you’re hurt; please don’t make me worry more_. But he doesn’t say any of those things, choosing instead to turn to the kitchen with an, “I’ll start getting dinner ready.”

* * *

Maka’s still annoyed and frustrated, but she’s not so annoyed that she doesn’t notice that dinner is exceptionally good. Soul shrugs off her appreciation, and that’s that.

* * *

Agatha Christie wrote sixty-six murder mysteries, and Maka has determined to read as many of those as she can in one sitting. Her definition of “one sitting” conveniently ignores classes as well as the times when Soul makes her eat or steals her book and forces her to get some sleep, meaning a few days pass in a haze of dead bodies and attempts to piece together who the murderer must be before the explanations come in the final pages. She knows Soul is in the house and around during this time, but she doesn’t really pay attention to what occupies him so thoroughly in the kitchen.

* * *

Maka doesn’t have trouble sleeping often. The things that other meisters have mentioned keep them awake at night—worrying about their weapon, worrying about the missions they’ll be sent out on, worrying about doing well in their classes—don’t generally weigh her down. She knows she can rely on Soul, that together they have strength they don’t have alone. That said, sometimes she finds herself staring at the ceiling unable to rest or, in tonight’s case, waking up suddenly after dreams steadily replaying the moments leading up to her most recent injury.

She flips the light on next to her, chest heaving as she breathes through the oppressive memory of those moments. The minutes tick by in silence as she calms down and slowly becomes aware of a low hum from the living room. Unlike her, Soul struggles to sleep, and it’s not unusual for Maka to walk to the kitchen for a glass of water in the middle of the night and find him blearily watching whatever late-night movie happens to be showing. It feels futile to attempt to fall back to sleep, and she doesn’t really _want_ to fall asleep again either, so Maka grabs a blanket from the foot of her bed and shuffles out to the couch. As expected, Soul is there. Not as expected, she doesn’t find Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to save the world or Cary Grant gazing into a woman’s eyes. Instead some kind of baking competition plays out on their screen.

Soul’s arm is flung out across the back of the couch, and Maka tucks herself into the space underneath it. “Whatcha watching?”

“Great British baking show.”

Maka rolls her eyes at that, muttering about how she noticed that, but she subsides without any more complaints, focusing instead on her partner’s steady breathing and the explanation of what one competitor is putting in her sweet bread while some lady tries to steal some of her ingredients and Soul huffs a laugh. When she wakes up, it’s to the gentle rise and fall of Soul’s chest underneath her head and to only the vaguest of memory of the nightmares of last night.

* * *

Blair, who keeps odd hours and odder company but still tries to spend time with Maka and Soul every week so she can keep an eye on her kittens, starts making sure she’s around for dinner, which Soul has volunteered to make for the entirety of Maka’s convalescence. It’s an unusual development. What’s more unusual is that she’s been focusing more on eating than on turning Soul into a spluttering, blushing mess. It’s . . . weird. And Maka doesn’t know what to do with whatever is taking place in front of her—

“This is good, Soulie.”

“It’s Nigella’s.”

“Awww, my kitten is learning so much!”

—What does that even mean? Who is Nigella? What is happening?

* * *

She’s going mad, and if Soul has to live with her much longer, he’s going to go mad as well. The last three days have passed inside watching rain pour down and Maka become increasingly antsy. She finished her Nerd-a-Thon four days ago, opted to walk in the park rather than go to the library and get more books then, and has clearly been regretting her life and her choices since then as, with most of the school off on some mission, she can’t even go to class.

“Are you sure we can’t go to the library?”

Soul sends a look at her. They have had this conversation seventeen times now. The charm of a rainy day ended halfway through the first day, and she’s been itching for anything to alleviate her boredom and take her mind of the itch of healing skin and jagged stitches crawling across her torso. Soul sympathizes, he really does—he remembers too vividly his own turn of waiting for the center of his body to feel less like useless, mangled flesh and more like one whole piece—but he is not about to unnecessarily take his motorcycle out into a downpour simply because she no longer wants to read about murder and instead wants to read Regency romances and maybe a classic of Russian literature. There are two women in his life, his meister and his bike, and while Maka’s needs will always come before his bike’s needs, his bike’s needs will often—okay, sometimes—trump Maka’s whims.

Also, he went outside to see if they could walk to the library, and the rain was a cold, needling one that immediately froze you to your bones. He wasn’t taking her outside and risking her getting sick, and he wasn’t leaving her alone for an hour and a half while he schlepped to the library, grabbed all of her requests, and lugged them back. So. They were at an impasse. Unless . . .

* * *

Soul is a mystery, and while she could ask what is going on with him and Blair and the kitchen, a good detective doesn’t show her hand quite so quickly. But she can’t go to the library to research, and even if she could, Soul orbits around her and her sickbed, a constant presence tickling on the edge of her consciousness, which is comforting and soothing rather than looming and claustrophobia-inducing like it would be if it were anyone else. However, it does mean that any form of research is practically impossible, but she can’t not do anything, so maybe they could—

Fabric slaps into her face, shocking her out of spiraling thoughts. She glares at Soul, who simply looks nonplussed. “We’re baking bread.”

Which, what?

* * *

Soul insisted she do all the kneading, and it isn’t until Maka is pounding the shit out of the sticky dough on their countertop that she realizes how much she needed to pound the shit out of something. Normally she would go to training with Soul and lead him through maneuvers, but swinging a scythe around is firmly on the list of things she is currently prohibited from doing lest she want to strain something, disappoint Soul, and find herself being babysat by her father. So Soul supervising while she gleefully pummels the living daylights out of the dough to force the yeast into forming gluten is definitely the best way, if not the weirdest, to work out her frustrations.

Maka’s not sure how long she has spent working the dough before Soul calls her off, forming the dough into a ball that he then prods with his index finger: “Overworked. Paul would not approve.”

“What?”

“What?”

“Have you been getting . . . weirder lately?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re the weird one, bookworm.” He pokes at the dough a few more times before dumping it into a glass bowl and tossing a towel over the entire thing. “C’mon, we gotta leave it to rise now.”

And just like that, he walks out of the kitchen, leaving Maka to wonder when he learned how to bake bread and how she had missed it.

* * *

Answers don’t come until the weather changes, and she can finally, _finally_ , go to the library. They walk in to an older woman sitting behind the circulation desk, who positively beams when she sees Soul. Soul blushes and scuttles away, leaving Maka to look after him in bemusement and then hone in on the nice lady her weapon fled from.

Her name is Evelyn. She works in the library and hurt her back free-climbing in the mountains with her girlfriend a decade ago and has had to take life at a slower pace since then. She loves the kids who run around the library—generally to go read their favorite books but sometimes just to get away from their parents or older siblings—and likes to pretend she’s hard of hearing if anyone complains about them. She also loves the people who genuinely like to read, who wander around the library trying to find the right books. Like that nice young man Maka came in with.

“What do you mean, like Soul?”

“Well, he hasn’t come in for a little while, but for a while he was coming in practically every day. He would fill a sack with books really quickly, but then he would go over to the cookbook section and spend a lot of time picking out one cookbook to read. And he’s so polite! Always chats with me about his last cookbook and what he had learned and tried. Said he was getting the other books for a friend who was sick, that he wanted to be able to cook for her when she was better and that the cooking kept him from worrying as much about her. He’s such a sweetheart. Do you know if she’s doing better?”

“Yes, yes she is, ma’am.” Maka walks away in a bit of a daze and, despite her former enthusiasm to get out and get new books, is quiet the entire walk home. She misses the way Soul sends her concerned glances.

* * *

Here’s the thing: Soul likes Evelyn. She’s a nice lady with some badass stories, and he once watched her stare down a man three times her size who had been ranting on the phone at an ever-increasing volume in the middle of the library. She didn’t even stop looking like she was two seconds away from offering some small children cookies while doing so, yet she effectively cowed the man. That being said, she had clearly said something that had upset Maka, and he couldn’t let that fly. Which means he has to go talk with Evelyn and hope she tells him what happened because he has zero intimidation techniques that would work on her. In general he has zero intimidation techniques beyond turning half his body into a scythe, which is both very effective and very ineffective as he can’t exactly wield himself.

He even needs Maka to effectively intimidate someone.

Soul tries not to think about how lost he would be without her, but then she winds up on a table with bandages wrapped around Stein’s careful stitches or he sees death come for her in the form of a blade slicing towards her that she can’t or won’t block and he can’t help but think about it. The DWMA teaches weapons that willingness to throw themselves in front of the line of fire to protect the world in general and their meisters in specific is what makes a strong weapon, but they don’t teach weapons how to curb that impulse, to let their meisters take care of the things they need to do, to stand by the side when necessary. Although it’s possible he’s the only weapon who really struggles with that. Maka is the most capable person he’s ever met, but that doesn’t prevent Soul from wanting to step in wherever possible to lighten any load that tries to weigh her down.

That’s another thing he tries not to think about. He doesn’t need any reminders about how gone he is for her. He already has enough, and he thinks even Black Star is starting to catch on.

Soul begins considering and dreading his return trip to the library to learn what has so upset Maka when she finally turns to him: “Hey, Soul?”

“Hmm?”

“Does it bother you when I’m in the infirmary? Do you get worried?”

He can taste the knee-jerk cool-guy reaction on his tongue, the comment about how great it is to not have to share the bathroom in the morning and how cool guys never worry. But he catches sight of her face, and the quip withers on his tongue. She looks drawn in on herself, the way she gets in those moments when she’s moved past her sheer blinding anger at her father to be sad about everything that happened, all the fights she overheard that she still has only told him pieces of, all the ways her parents hurt each other and, unknowingly, her.

“Course I get worried. But that’s not your problem.”

It doesn’t help, but he can see her start to turn away as if it does, not wanting to put too much of this burden on him, and so he reaches out, captures her wrist in his fingers and forces himself to keep talking. “I don’t like seeing you hurt. It’s _our_ job to protect the world, but it’s _my_ job to protect you. I don’t—” he cuts himself off, breathes deeply—“I don’t like knowing that me not doing my job right means you get hurt. Seeing you all wrapped up, just, you know, reminds me of that. That I could have been better. That I should have been better. For you.”

Soul can see the exact moment the fight returns to her eyes and interrupts Maka before she can tell him just how dumb he is to think he can always keep her safe: “I know you’re just doing your job and that you knew being a meister would mean injuries when you decided to train as one and that you don’t expect me to protect you always and that my job is more than just keeping you safe, but that doesn’t mean I don’t _feel_ like I’ve messed up. So yeah, I worry about you. You’re my meister and my best friend, and it’s weird when you’re quiet in an infirmary and not raving about your books.”

“So is that why you did it?”

She’s looking up at him with a curious head tilt, and he’s lost the thread of their conversation. Soul’s pretty sure she doesn’t know how cute she is when she looks at him like that, but he also rarely knows what’s going on in her head. Maybe she does know.

“Did what?”

“Started checking cookbooks out from the library and practicing cooking. Evelyn said it was so you would worry less.”

“Evelyn talks too much,” Soul grumbles, looking away from the suddenly gleeful expression on Maka’s face.

They’re going to be okay.

* * *

Classes begin again, and Maka makes sure to notice Soul’s cooking, now that they’re back on their usual schedule of switching who cooks each night. It’s really delicious, now that she’s paying attention, and she might enjoy the way he blushes at her compliments before cutting her off with a disclaimer as to who he got the recipe from. As if the recipe coming from Alton Brown or America’s Test Kitchen make his work less impressive.

She also begins joining him in late-night watches of the baking show, which turns out to actually be called _The Great British Baking Show_ , and if she maybe snuggles up to him more than she used to, maybe delights in the way he relaxes even more when he feels her steady breaths against his side, the only one to notice is Soul. And he, with his lazy grins and thoughtful actions and snarky words, isn’t saying anything.

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus!  
> Maka doesn't approve of keeping secrets from your teammates, but she thinks she perhaps understands Soul's reluctance to share the cooking thing when, in the space of two months, a garish flowery apron with a star blazoned across the chest, a pinstripe apron with perfectly symmetrical pockets, and a frilly apron that looks like it was rejected from a preschool and has a border of dancing giraffes across the bottom all appear in their kitchen.
> 
> Soul simply sighs and reaches for the closest one before he begins the cookies.


End file.
